PLC Provides Control System for Washington State Route 520

PLC-Transportation has finished its largest project to date; Washington State Route 520’s new tunnel and roadway lighting control system was recently completed. Three tunnels’ lights on the east side of Seattle’s Lake Washington and two miles of interconnecting roadway lighting are controlled using the ELMS system. ELMS is the Electrical Lighting and Management System, NTCIP Standard 1213. The ELMS system provided the ability to configure, control and monitor roadway and tunnel lighting circuits using public data communication infrastructure from the WSDOT offices 15 miles away in Shoreline, Washington.

The system consisted of three tunnel lighting control cabinets, each of which had an ELMS datalogger/controller and fiber optic communications to send data to the Shoreline based server and workstations. The architecture of the ELMS system will allow for additional structures and dataloggers to be added to the system. The PLC-Transportation’s team included integration partners Gridaptive and The Ferrari Group as well as project manager Tom Remedios, hardware engineer Steve Houle, field technician Jasmin Grebovic, and programmer Norm Dittmann.